People are increasingly relying on portable computing devices for communication, including not only telephonic communication but also texting, instant messaging, chat, and other such communication channels. A potential downside to at least some of these types of communication is that it can be relatively difficult for a user to accurately enter information on these devices. For example, a user's thumb is often significantly larger that the size of a key or virtual button displayed on a touch screen of a smart phone or other such device, which often results in the user selecting an improper element, such as the wrong key on a virtual keyboard. In order to assist the user in entering text on these devices, many portable devices utilize one or more auto-correct algorithms that analyze text that was inputted to the device, and attempt to correct for minor typographical errors that the user might have entered, such as may include letters that were one character off, words that were misspelled, etc. These approaches generally rely on a dictionary stored on the portable device, which contains a limited number of entries. Oftentimes, words such as proper nouns, product names, foreign words, and other such entries might be mistakenly “corrected” by the algorithm, which can be frustrating for the user if the user obtains irrelevant results or content, as well as if the user has to re-enter the information a number of times in order for the text to be processed as entered by the user.